As an ‘asymmetrical’ age, we are stuck in the gap between things and knowledge about them, but even so, there is no way to reach the totality of things in a way that is more comprehensive than any other, and the openness of things is due to their inexhaustibility.
If you have an initial concept and are ready to start working, but you cannot say that that is making art, because you cannot judge that it is art by thinking alone, because you have not yet touched anything, but if you use a tool, a pen, a knife, but that is only touching things through a technique. You can't always get to the totality of the thing, or all its characteristics and properties, you are always working between part/whole, part/whole, fluctuating, due to the ‘gaps’ between us and the world, gaps that lie in the correlation of the thing with it, we are not completely stuck in a certain position, but we are We are not completely stuck in a certain place, but rather, we are travelling in the space between knowledge and things, and there is no knowledge (including science) that can exhaust the full range of properties of a thing, and a thing will always run away from the relations it faces, and this running away produces the surplus of the thing, as well as the fact that it is always open, an openness that is also expressed today in its political and ethical dimensions. The gap, rather than being a burden, allows us to recognise this gap between us and the thing as a fundamental existence, which is the ‘thing-in-itself’.
Therefore, I cannot say with certainty that because I have a motive, and because this motive is artistic, this consequence should be artistic.

variations
Variations are a fundamental part of our ecology today, those things that cannot be seen at first sight, those ungraspable things that exist between formation, occurrence and feeling in time, which happen to all things. In the studio, objects that are scattered in different places, a clamp, a piece of slate, a pile of wood shavings, a drawing, can all be variations of a ‘hard to say’. A sculpture that looks like it has an undulating, uneven surface is just information about the form, but you can't say that it's a sculpture; you touch it with your hand. You touch its surface, metal or stone? You touch some of its properties, but you still only get a part of the sculpture; a viewer stands in front of the sculpture and takes a picture of it, and the sculpture again becomes the background for the viewer in the picture.
Every thing you can usually identify as a variations family under normal circumstances, an electric car, a can of colour, a wooden board, none of them will ever let you fully understand them. That board, the one that looks hard, like the plastic board next to it, you get the ‘look’, but it's not the board, the ‘look hard’ is just a kind of knowledge we project onto many things, or rather, many things give us the ‘look hard’, the ‘look hard’, the ‘look hard’. ‘Or rather, many things give us the feeling that they look hard, and that's just one nature of the thing, there's more to it than that. When I glued the panels together, they felt like a rock taken from the mountains, they had a regular pattern, you forget that they are panels because you start to focus on the fact that it's a material, a material used to make art, and the panels recede into their properties, you forget about them, they are exactly what they are. When I had a day, due to a malfunction (the chainsaw cut too much, or the drill was too hard), they had the property of being ‘soft to use’ as a board. It's just another encounter, they seem to have a lot of ‘other’ properties and you never get the ‘all’ feeling. This may be how things lead to metaphors of what they are.
Often, the information about a thing is complex enough that the correlations may be sorted out to make sense, but that's just a collection of information about the thing, it's not the thing. The Ozon board has a lot of that information, and it gives it to me to make me think that it is what it is. The way of figuring out the essence by combing through the clues is outdated today because there is such an asymmetry between the thing and the information that it leads to gaps and also produces asymmetrical variations.
Once we get tired of that constant and unchanging knowledge, and begin to express cynicism about reason, and lose interest in what other people are saying, and don't want to know too much about a thing, or a behaviour, or that it doesn't make sense, we turn to sensation, and say that sensation, that self-sense is important, and it sounds like sensation is like a pair of gloves, that are already on the hand, and touch the other side, and the sensation comes to the hand. That feeling that stays in the glove is as real as the real situation of the feeling, it's wired to the cognitive system before the nervous system kicks in, ‘I feel this picture is so good,’ ‘Nothing can replace the way I feel,’ but that's also not the thing, it's your way of getting the thing The description of it. Feelings are not a refuge, not even temporary, they don't protect you from the information of the day.

The Gap
Discuss the fact that no matter how much detail you use, you're just ‘looking away’, and ‘looking away’ is a machine with standardised procedures already in place, and this is where AI can quickly take over today. The visionary believes in what they ‘see’, whether it's a landscape or a sculpture, because in this vision, they are all identifiable targets, but this target is surrounded by interpretation, that sculpture is metal, realistic, abstract, distorted, and then added; the material of the sculpture symbolises freedom, the shape reflects reality. The material of the sculpture symbolises freedom, the shape reflects the reality, and this ‘distant look’ has become a cognitive package. But interestingly, these interpretations are just as appropriate in other places, which means that this ‘looking away’ is just an operation of human beings on the world outside themselves, not the world itself.
But you can do it differently, you try to get closer, we call it the sense of presence, like a sculpture, you get closer to it, and the totality of the original ‘looking away’ is gone (but some of it is still left in the awareness), and there are shapes in front of you, pointy, curved, and you see things that you can't see from the ‘looking away’. You will also see lines and bumps that you could not see ‘from afar’, and even some obscure light in the cracks, and you will begin to think that this is a different world from the one you saw ‘from afar’, and you will have a new consciousness. There is also frustration with ‘holistic’ experiences, where the local disappears and is controlled by a kind of cause and effect. If you try to touch the material with a tool in your hand, you actually walk into the sculpture, and the sculpture as a sculpture disappears, it's no longer a list of properties of the material, and it's not the history of art borrowing from your eyes, but you look at the grain of the wood, and you run a tool (a sander) slowly across the surface, and a different geography emerges, and you can't be sure if it's the power of your hand, or the tool itself, or the original structure of the wood, or if it's the strength of your hand, or the power of the tool itself, or the power of the wood. You are not sure, is it the power of your hand, or the tool itself, or the original structure of the wood? But one thing is certain, you see something different from the usual, a trace of the action of a group of actors in this time, which does not appear in the original consciousness, and reality is opened. However, this reality that is opened is not surprising, it even overwhelms you and can be anxious, because you do not know exactly what is going on, they are not within your grasp, you can mobilise your misplaced experiences, your experiences, but none of them will be so easy for you to capture, and you may even forget what you are doing, because there is no evidence, you are here but you don't know where you are, and you are at the same time lose the ability to justify and explain.
This can cause you anxiety, and this change in ‘distance’ can cause psychological stress, anxiety, and even the loss of some common sense, that is, the understanding, perception, and interpretation of things on which ‘looking away’ is based, the methods and paths you use to get to things. You don't have access to more information, even if there is some (images, schemas, shapes), but that's the only grip you have at the moment, they all come from the past, and then you continue your path of reassurance along the lines of this, the tools are reactivated, the body is revitalised, the wood is enriched, and in this way you are once again rewrapped in the things and they are, but it's not an art.

Uncapturable
Interpretation is not just literal, when you are confronted with a piece of work, whether you handle it by hand, whether you read a picture, whether you read someone else's words, it is a way of accessing the work, you are using it, you are manipulating it, but it is not about the work itself.
When you start to do it, what we call ‘practice’, and you cut a piece of wood with a chainsaw, you've changed the situation from one of interpretation, but you don't say right away that the piece of wood you've cut is art. You would say that it's process, which means that you are still in a ‘complete’ judgement of things, in the act of ‘I'm making a work of art’, ‘I'm going by my feelings’, ‘my intuition tells me’, ‘I'm making a work of art’. ‘my intuition tells me’, ‘the body reacts’, practice is largely mistaken as natural, anti-interpretative, anti-theoretical, and as a more accurate way of approaching things, so that things can be purely and naturally rendered in practice, but this is just another ‘complete’ judgement of things. It's just another way of ‘interpreting’ things, it's just some information about things that you get with your hands, and it's limited to you, and your projections of things. But today non-humans are facilitating the part of you that can see, that doesn't enter into your interpretation, that is working, and this work also leads to the illusion that only practice can access the real. This at the same time creates the illusion that you seem to be dealing with the real, as in the scenario we were in at the seminar, where we were talking about a thing, for example, reality, and at this point in time reality is a background, a container, on condition of being able to fit the thing being talked about into it, and it must be such a container, neutral and functional, and apart from that the thing is always absent from this reality .
Therefore, practice does not guarantee that you are in touch with the ‘real’, just as the fact that an artist uses the tools of art - brushes, sanding machines - does not mean that it is necessarily art, but just a conventional connection, ‘artist’, materials, tools, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’, ‘artist’. ‘The artist, the materials, the tools, and by interpreting this connection is art? Thinking in terms of art means that art is already outside of that.
How many doubts tell you that in today's age of knowledge, you must deal with problems in your ‘own’ way, so that a ‘sensibility’ mixed with romantic and classical feelings becomes a Buddha's foot and recovers the old passion, because passion makes more ‘non-professionals’. It allows more ‘irrationality’ and ‘self-perception’ to surround you and to resist the inhumanity that really surrounds you. Things, which appear to you as equals when your sense of subjectivity is not so strong, have always played an important role, they are the allies that allow us to escape from the prison of the original rationality, which you have replaced with ‘your own’.
The messages that you are willing to accept, unwilling to recognise, resist and embrace are all about you, they constitute all our urgencies. These urgencies make up our ecology.
In fact, it's hard for an artist to say what kind of ecology he or she is living in, most of the time full of doubts about the work in front of him or her, torn between wanting to know right away and not being able to know right away, and also subject to certain plausible insinuations that ‘an artist doesn't need to know what he or she is doing,’ and that ‘this is intuition", so as to ensure that the power of the work remains in the hands of the person who, through experiential guidance, self-suggestion, and physical training, has in fact been struggling with things. But much of what becomes fact is the result of chance, which cannot be summed up as ‘fate’, nor is it the expression of an ‘inexpressible’ sensibility, or, more crudely, a ‘mystical’ experience. Not everything that is done needs to be known, nor does it need to be ‘not known’ to be profitable.
There is nothing special about the ecology of art, because art as ecology is interconnected with all other forms of life.

Cause and Effect
No one denies that a work, no matter how much it changes in the process of its formation, undergoes a similar process, from the initial idea or ‘inspiration’, to the choice of medium, to the craftsmanship, or to a certain path that leads to the creation of a work. But in terms of the cause and effect of things, this process involves more than ‘a work’, of which it is only one.
For, in our contact with things, there are more causal relations involved than just art. What makes us say with certainty that ‘this relationship is art’ and ‘that's just a technique’? At the same time, it is difficult to accept that there is not necessarily an ‘artistic’ causal relationship in the artist's contact with things. So does the ‘more’ causality disappear or is it removed?
For example, a material is more open than art before it becomes art, and it is not the fact that it becomes art that proves its openness; an addition that intervenes in usage and function is itself one of the properties of the material.
In contrast to traditional objects, although we are beginning to have the concept of the microcosm, the invisible worlds are much larger in terms of the visible world and are still coming into our world in a constant stream, they occur, develop and move without interruption, their interiors make it difficult for us to observe them from the outside, for example, the densities within the materials, which can only be understood by the intervention of the outside and of the tools that are available to us to understand their functioning. They rehearse their own theatre in the space of density, and each ‘performance’ is unique in an ontological sense.
So far, the materials I have tried, such as the Ozon board, have never been the same, they have maintained the basic properties of Ozon board, but at the same time, they have shown more tensions between nature and time, each time dragging me into a state of uncertainty. In my dealings with them, I would constantly use my past experiences to solve the problems of what was happening in front of me, to find a name for the contingencies, but long before I could name them, they were already at work, and many of those effects took place outside of my judgement, and to a large extent, when the many contingencies began to appear en masse, my experiences were full of holes, and moreover, they were are still in flux and do not stop at a single individual; they have begun to relate to each other.
If the process of a sculpture or painting has different nomenclatures, such as draft period, production period, formation period, dividing a clear linear time, then one thing is overlooked, our rough categorisation of objects is just trying to manage things, ignoring the unnamed part of them that constantly flows out of time.
Most of the changes in a work occur at any moment that is ‘unprepared’, or even if it just leaves a consequence, without being able to trace its cause. Most of the objects change and are lost when they come into contact with other objects, and they cannot be reduced to chance, because any chance contains a multitude of elements that, like the entanglement of particles, do not appear in the same place and time in the same way. ‘ type of regularity of the world whose forces are limited to a certain range, juxtaposed to the microcosm.

Symbiosis
This is what biological symbiosis brings to the table. Symbiosis, whereby the parasite and the host become one. Some parts of each original fade away, retaining only some of their own DNA to distinguish them from the other. Insofar as some materials, tools, and machines are so entangled with each other that it is no longer possible to discern the volume and position of each collaborator, art retains this ancient and primitive gene without being able to be taken away by knowledge and instrumentation. In her book, biologist Margulies quotes another biologist, Schmidt, who likens the product of biological symbiosis to the smile of a ‘Cheshire cat’. ‘Gradually the creature loses parts of its body and slowly blends into the whole background...’ that fictional cat, the real smile, becomes the vanishingly real.
Symbiosis is the result of symbiotic evolution, just like the co-operation between materials and tools, between tools and those who use them, it has become difficult to say whether it is because a particular material has led to the renewal of the tool, or whether it is the change in the way the tool is used that has led to the material releasing a greater tension. But in any case, the two are constantly adapting their positions and functions, they are partly out of their original positions and working together, rather than being the sum of their own strengths, they can only be an emergence. For example, the metal vibrating hammer ‘loses’ its original object of steel and concrete and ushers in the continuity and fragility of the osone board, which disappears from its original position (doors, windows, cabinets) and grows a shape, a new shape that grows out of the loss of the functional part of both sides. A kind of loss of the past that leads to the destabilisation of the perceived object. Yesterday is gone, the traces can no longer support the subject, and it is inevitable that we confront the ruinous fragments in front of us, reconstructing a new aesthetic experience without any longer allowing it to become an object of knowledge and a derivative.
At the same time, there is reason to believe that what we generally call art is only one of the causal outcomes of this thing's encounter with us, and that there is more causality taking place in the process. On the one hand we selectively omit it because we don't think it is, and on the other hand they remain hidden in the background and we have to learn new capacities to open them.
Before a thing has a symbiosis with another, they all exist separately, the minerals, the organics, the reds in colour are all one thing, not becoming colours to be used by you for red to make sense. The offering of contingency as a god is the simplest and most egregious explanation for perceptual actions and objects. For on the one hand there is the illusion of contingency as necessity, and on the other hand there is the automatic exclusion of the conditions, the circumstances, and the great amount of labour that contingency requires.
Let us understand more closely a sculpture which, as a nomenclature, seems to have always existed, to have existed in the imagination and labour of the artist, so that it seems to be due to the fact that identity determines art, and that there is no such thing as a purely artistic labour. This story is a little too romantic, and it ignores the fact that the process of art's symbiosis is essentially a war.
In this ecology, where many familiar structures have disappeared and more, heterogeneous objects are growing ferociously, is this the attack of a group, or is it the defence and resistance of the group? Perhaps it is in the mutual entanglement of the two sides that more than the two sides emerge, some of the original clear-faced bodies begin to grow unfamiliar branches, I, materials, tools, electricity, temperature are no longer just the conditions for each other's growth, but the environment for the symbiosis of a new species. Symbiosis abounds in this environment, they draw on the energy around them, which is held by me, the materials depend on the tools to show themselves, the tools depend on the materials to prove themselves, and these strange, meddlesome, mobile, or not-yet-quite-clear bodies rampage, or float, or swim, through the new ecology, and the creatures of the original aboriginal population have to adapt to the new objects, which are not growing according to their own evolutionary programme. new objects, and these too are in the variations and times of symbiotic evolution.

WangJianwei
2023/11